a sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun
by possibilist
Summary: '"Why'd you kiss me?" you ask her. "I wanted to," Spencer says. It's simple. "Why'd you kiss me back?" You kiss her again. "You don't remind me of anyone else I've ever known."' Fabrastings drabbles, college and future stuff.
1. Chapter 1

summary: '"Why'd you kiss me?" you ask her. "I wanted to," Spencer says. It's simple. "Why'd you kiss me back?" You kiss her again. "You don't remind me of anyone else I've ever known."' Fabrastings drabbles, college and future stuff.

an (1): so, i totally loved writing this pairing. it's so faceted and beautiful and smart. so this is going to be a multichap-type fic, but it's going to be drabbly and random and possibly not in order.

an (2): title from tom waits. chapter title from andrea gibson's 'wasabi.'

...

a sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun

.

one. _your hips the gates of hell if i know if heaven exists, but this will do just fine_

...

The first time you see Spencer, from a distance, you think she looks like Rachel, but only because she has long brown hair and shoulders set in constant defiance of the world.

But then she's as tall as you are, or maybe even a little taller if you don't stand up straight. Everything around you smells like smoke, because you're at a bar, climbing off a stage; the lights are dimmed since you finished.

You want to say something from _Casablanca_, because Spencer is the kind of beautiful that is torn from another era; you are too, and you understand this because it requires crushing sadness.

In another time, you would have remembered Lot's wife; Spencer kisses you, and she is soft.

You forget Rachel; you forget Santana and Abigail and Eloise Pendleton; you remember (or meet) yourself.

.

"I tried to steal all of my sister's boyfriends or fiances." Spencer rubs her nose.

"I tried to steal back my daughter from her adoptive mother."

Spencer spins her coffee mug around on the table, brow knit in concentration. "This is an absurd game," she finally says, meeting your eyes.

You laugh. "You're really the only one who's come close to being able to challenge me, though. It's nice."

Spencer tilts her head. "Yeah, it is."

.

"Why'd you kiss me?" you ask her.

"I wanted to," she says. It's simple. "Why'd you kiss me back?"

You kiss her again. "You don't remind me of anyone else I've ever known."

.

During November, you're in your dorm. Kissing Spencer is unlike anything you've ever done before; it's not full of fear or anger, but longing. There's certainly a part of you that doesn't understand how you begin to want her, because it doesn't hurt the way longing after Rachel did. It's because you _have _Spencer, because Spencer wants you back.

Your heart is a rabbit in your chest; sometimes you fear it will go too fast and never finish whatever frantic race you've been running your entire life—running away from demons, running away from yourself.

You sit back against Spencer's hips and she looks up at you; she _looks_.

Her hair is messy from your hands; her lips are swollen from your lips.

She looks uncertain; the accident is the trump card of all of the games you've played so far. You haven't told her because of so many reasons, because it's something that you can't explain, because it's something that haunts you all the time (you used to be a dancer).

She fists her hands in the bottom of your soft sweater; it's winter and you're tired of dresses, you're tired of being perfect, you're tired of hiding. You're _tired_.

You close your eyes. You don't stop your hands. The air of your dorm feels cool, soothing. Spencer touches the scars that web across your ribs, then draws a line to your heart.

It gives you goosebumps. You tell her, "My soul has managed to squeeze into such narrow spaces."

She brings her lips against your scars. She tells you that you are beautiful.

You believe her. She has scars too.

.

"You're a poet," she tells you.

"Spencer," you say, "anyone can be a poet if you're sad enough."

.

One night you fight your way out of a nightmare, one that is actually more of just a memory than anything else.

You feel around, because there's weight on your chest and you're disoriented.

"Quinn?"

It's Spencer's voice.

"Hey," she says.

You try to breathe and you realize you're shaking; she's holding you to her chest. "When the paramedics got there I was conscious," you whisper.

She brushes aside your messy bangs.

"They administered a corticosteroid, you know. And a chest tube."

"Quinn," Spencer says again, and she's smart enough to say it like no one else ever has.

.

You talk to Rachel, who is dating someone new.

You are too, and you're happy for both of you, absolutely and unequivocally, because he seems like such a better guy than Finn and Rachel is back to rambling and being completely overbearing and ridiculous, and you don't feel in nearly as much pain when she says your name.

You're also pretty sure that Spencer is smarter than anyone you'll ever meet, even at Yale or after that, and that's something that, for some reason, makes you feel absolutely proud.

.

You win the game: "I have depression," you say.

Spencer closes her eyes. She hates to lose.

.

"Come home with me," Spencer says. "Just for a weekend."

"Are you going to dress me up and introduce me to your parents? Show me off?"

Spencer smiles slightly. "Nope."

"Then why do you want me to come home with you?"

"Two reasons," she says, then kisses your closed eyelids. "First, I want to make some good memories in a place that hasn't had too many of them."

"And the second?" you ask, because she's brave.

"I want to prove to everyone that I really did meet someone just as crazy as I am."

She laughs.

"You're an idiot," you say.

"Is that a yes?"

"Fine," you say. "Fine."

.

She meets Beth and you meet all of her family; you introduce her to Santana and Rachel and eventually your sister via Skype.

She still feels like the only person who's made you see yourself, and that's something.

In her big, cold, empty house, you make love all night long.

.

"You make me feel so happy," she tells you.

"It's a novel thing, isn't it?"

.

The first time you have to go to the hospital is two days before your nineteenth birthday, because your lung spontaneously collapses during a tickle-fight.

Spencer stays calm and makes sure to follow procedure that you're convinced she googled—just in case—because Spencer did stuff like that.

They give you anesthesia this time when they put in a chest tube, and when you wake up, Spencer is holding your hand, staring at you worriedly.

"We're going to live forever," you mumble through your oxygen mask.

She smiles.

It feels like the truth.

.

You get a summer internship in Philadelphia, at U Penn, so that you don't have to go back to Ohio, because it feels so scary you can't breathe—you're not that brave.

Spencer gets into a program at a museum there, too.

She takes you to Pride.

You wonder what your father would say to you now, and, for the first time in your entire life, you don't care at all.


	2. your heart beats 900 times a day

an (1): fabrastings drabble part two. because i've been imagining this conversation for a very, _very _long time.

an (2): title from anis mojgani's 'shake the dust.' listen to gem club's 'in wavelengths.']

...

winter. _do not let a moment go by that doesn't remind you that your heart beats 900 times a day and that there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean. (do not settle for letting these waves settle and the dust to collect in your veins.)_

.

One night, you let Quinn convince you to watch _The Tree of Life_—Aria had tried for months and you staunchly refused—and you try to understand it for about thirty minutes before you give up and grab a bottle of red wine from your fridge.

As you pass it back and forth, you find yourself completely overwhelmed—with the feel of Quinn's skin against your fingers, with the smell of her shampoo, with the flicker of light from the screen of your television, the immense life swelling to fill all of the gaps in the darkness, the aching somewhere in the spaces between your teeth, pounding into the vertebrae of Quinn's spine, which are slightly misaligned.

"I'm sorry," you tell her, over and over again, whispers.

Quinn shakes her head and kisses you and smiles sleepily afterward and you fall asleep with her, draped in a blanket of knit, shrouded safety, one you've never even known before, your heart caught somewhere in the warm space between staying awake to watch the sunrise and beginning to dream, and you believe you've found the place of nature and of grace, because you will remember her always, no matter what, and, despite yourself, she forgives you for all you've ever done.

.

"What are you watching?" Santana asks, handing you a cup of coffee—black—as she sits down in the chair next to yours.

"_The Thin Red Line_." You shrug. "Quinn loves Terrence Malick."

Santana looks away from the laptop resting on the tray table to Quinn's sleeping form. "She does, huh?"

"I have no idea _why_," you say.

Santana laughs. "He's like her confusing brain in film form."

You nod. "And then, like, if I try to turn it off, or change it, I swear to God she wakes up."

"It's her sixth sense." Santana takes Quinn's hand, and the gesture seems so automatic. "When we'd watch movies together at sleepovers, she could be asleep for the entire thing, but she'd wake up the second the credits started playing."

You don't say anything, but instead you watch Quinn. She's lying on her side, curled up, an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, around her head, rumpling her hair. She looks infinitely younger, dwarfed by all of the monitors around her, by the white room, by the snow outside the window.

"She doesn't talk about it, does she?" Santana asks; it's soft, unobtrusive, although Santana seems completely comfortable around all of the tubes and wires and blood.

"Not really," you tell her. "I mean, I've seen her scars and sometimes she has nightmares and I know that—No."

Santana nods, rubbing her thumb over the top of Quinn's. You wait for an indeterminately long time, idly watching World War II depicted in the most beautiful, painful fashion you've ever seen on Quinn's laptop.

"The worst part was when we were waiting," Santana says. She doesn't look at you. "There was bleeding in her brain, and they had no way of knowing whether or not it'd resolve on it's own, whether or not she'd need brain surgery or if there'd be permanent damage."

Quinn scrunches her nose in her sleep.

"They had to put in this little monitor, to make sure the pressure didn't get too high, and they shaved just this tiny part of her hair, on the side. We waited and waited and she woke up, and when she saw that she was so _pissed_." Santana laughs softly. "I don't think I've ever been so happy to see her be mad."

Santana smooths back Quinn's bangs.

She says, "The only thing worse to imagine than Quinn being dead is Quinn not being _Quinn_." She shrugs. "The whole time she was rehabbing or whatever, it was sad but she was exactly the same and there was a part of me that was so happy." Santana closes her eyes, like she's trying to use her eyelids as a mirror. "Do you know what it's like to lose your best friend?"

You say, "My best friend died when I was fifteen."

Santana sucks in a breath.

"You don't ever stop missing them," you tell her. "No matter how mad they made you; no matter how much you hated them. They're in your cells. You'll be walking down the street and you'll smell them, or you'll hear their laugh, or you'll see their favourite sweater. Like the world was suddenly constructed entirely from the things they loved."

Santana looks at their intertwined hands.

"Then some days you feel like you're forgetting them, when you don't feel out of breath when you smell their perfume or hear their favourite song. I used to think it was a bad thing, to forget."

You put your hand on the top of Santana's, spread your fingers so that you can feel Quinn's too.

"I love her, you know."

"That's why I haven't kicked your ass yet."

You smile, then squeeze her hand. "When we're together, it's like I'm finding out new things that maybe I'll never have to forget." You swallow. "And it's a really good thing, to feel like that."

"You must've been so scared, last night," she says.

And you were, blindingly terrified in the moment when Quinn couldn't breathe. It felt different than all the times you'd been scared before—which was a lot—because this wasn't something you understood; this wasn't something you could ever fix; you would never be smart enough to make this go away.

"If anything happened to Brittany, I—" Santana shakes her head.

"She's going to be okay." You say it for your own benefit as well. "I won't ever hurt her."

"I know," Santana says. She sits back and so do you. Quinn snores a little and you smooth down her hair, then kiss her forehead. You're suddenly overwhelmingly happy that she _exists_, that she will always be out there somewhere in the world, in the way her voice sounds when she wakes up and the way she splashes in puddles when it rains, the way she drinks tea.

Remembering is suddenly the most comforting notion you know.

The film quietly proclaims, _Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free. _

"It's good to know that there are people that remind us that we haven't died yet, huh?"

"Yes," you say. "It is."

...

references. because i went on a terrence malick kick yesterday and also today, _the thin red line _and _the tree of life_.


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